Jesus is LORD

1 Peter uses passages of scripture that speak of YHWH to describe Jesus Christ.( In doing so he includes Jesus in God’s unique divine identity. This is described by Richard Bauckham as ‘the highest christology of all’. YHWH was the name by which the God of Israel, who alone was God, was known. 1 Peter twice quotes Isaiah 8, a passage explicitly speaking of YHWH, to speak of Jesus. In Isaiah 8 the prophet is given a message about impending judgement and suffering at the hands of the Assyrians. The prophet Isaiah is told by YHWH ‘do not fear what they fear and do not dread it. The LORD almighty (YHWH) is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear.’ (Isaiah 8:12-13) and to trust him as a sanctuary, even though YHWH will be the stone that causes people to fall. 1 Peter 3:14b-15 tells the christians facing suffering ‘Do not fear what they fear: do not be frightened. But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord’ . Here the extremely high christology of identifying Christ with YHWH is useful to 1 Peter’s purpose. For the suffering christians addressed in 1 Peter, it is the Christ who is now to be regarded holy and should be viewed as a sanctuary. It is not that the Christ has replaced God, the readers are also told to fear God in 2:17, but that Christ is somehow included in YHWH.
This uniting of Christ and YHWH is also seen in 1 Peter 2:4-8. Christ is the living stone, rejected but chosen, in verse 4. The writer then uses three passages about stones to interpret one another and Jesus Christ. Psalm 118:22, quoted in 1 Peter 2:7, seems to be speaking of a messianic figure, or possibly of the whole of Israel. Isaiah 28:16, quoted in verse 6, also speaks of a servant of YHWH, again possibly YHWH himself in Isaiah 28:21. The quote from Isaiah 8:14 speaks explicitly of YHWH as the stumbling stone. Yet the writer is comfortable to use all three passages to speak of Jesus as both Christ and God. While some uses of kyrios for Jesus in the New Testament may be ambiguous, in
these quotes the septuagint ‘kyrios’ for YHWH in Isaiah is directly applied to Jesus. This calls into question Davies assertion that ‘There is no transference of divine standing or prerogatives’. It applies not only God’s ‘divine action in Jesus Christ’ , but to his divine identity. The many statements about God in 1 Peter that refer to the Father or God, and not Jesus, only show that Jesus was included in the identity of God and did not replace God. A reading of the entire epistle, (rather than just the ‘hymnic material’ that Earl Richard focuses on ) does not allow us to restrict the high christology to that of an exalted human, as both Richard and Davies do. This in turn calls into question Davies entire theory of a long Christological development from an early low to a late high . As noted by Hengel, ‘This development in christology progressed in a very short time’ . That 1 Peter can use such explicit connections between YHWH and Jesus without argument or explanation implies that an extremely high christology was already present for both the writer and audience of the epistle. 1 Peter displays an extremely high christology that includes Jesus in the identity of YHWH by using that name of Jesus.